The 400 Blows

Synopsis

Angel faces hell-bent for violence.

For young Parisian boy Antoine Doinel, life is one difficult situation after another. Surrounded by inconsiderate adults, including his neglectful parents, Antoine spends his days with his best friend, Rene, trying to plan for a better life. When one of their schemes goes awry, Antoine ends up in trouble with the law, leading to even more conflicts with unsympathetic authority figures.

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How do you explain what it's like to lose yourself in a film? The 400 Blows describes it particularly well. Francois Truffaut was an expert cinephile, after all: sneaking into theaters via washroom windows, gravitating closer and closer toward the screen so that for a few hours his world was only moving images shedding diffused light on hundreds of faces turned up to the screen.

But perhaps Truffaut wasn't intent on forgetting the rest of the world when he started sitting so close to the screen; perhaps he was simply dealing with weakening eyesight. That would be quite like him and his work, anyway: mundane realities finding their way into cinema in a manner that renders them achingly poetic.

I think people overlook how hard it is to be a kid. All kids at one point feel unwanted, unloved, or uncared for. It's universal, which is why this movie is so incredible. It takes something as simple as a broken household and makes it for everyone, something anyone can relate to.

The acting and score in particular are outstanding. The cinematography is gorgeous, and you can tell it has inspired many filmmakers today. Many aspects of this film also reminded me of Mommy and I Killed My Mother, both Xavier Dolan films (which is a great thing). I honestly am in love with this film and it's true, brutal, and heartbreaking story.

I’m incredibly disappointed in myself for not watching this film before now, but I’m almost glad I didn’t, as I’m currently the same age as the main character, which made the story even more relatable. As of now, this is easily one of my top 5 films of all time.

François Truffaut's feature film debut is a touching portrait of our adolescent years which beautifully captures the day-to-day activities we spent doing for hours despite it being deemed useless by our parents & teachers — the classes we bunked to go for movies or play, the teachers we loved to hate, and the many times we were 'disciplined' for the smallest of things.

The 400 Blows is my first stint with this director's works and the elegant manner in which he has unfolded this story before our eyes is sheer poetry. Set in early 1950s Paris, the film is an expertly crafted character study of a young adolescent who's often misunderstood by his peers and, after being left with no attention,…

This movie perfectly captured the feeling that I personally knew all too well as a child. The feeling you get when you know you have done something so terribly wrong, and you think your parents could never get over your wrongdoing. And you feel that the only viable option is to run away and start a life on your own.

You can have Boyhood, you can have Moonlight, you can have every other film in the Coming-of-age subgenre of Cinema, but nothing even comes remotely close to The 400 Blows; Truffaut's masterpiece masters, among other things, the purest and realist depiction of childhood angst and struggling to find your place at such a young age. Truffaut masters simplicity, showing the most minimal for the audience to understand Antoine's world, a world where he walks, yet finds unfamiliarity within its safe and secure borders. That ending, the realization that he's trapped; he will get caught and he will be punished. His last gasp of fresh air, before his world encloses himself in, is to see the ocean, the one thing that is more free than Antoine could ever imagine.

The more I think about it, the more I love this film. It was very inovational and shined a light on a point of view that’s frequently ignored in film— or not taken seriously. Nobody shows sympathy for the problematic child, we’re shown that in all sorts of films and day-to-day life— but The 400 Blows tells us to do otherwise. It shows an extremely unstable homelife, it shows struggle, it shows ignorance, it shows giving up, it shows us reason to care and feel empathy for this child. The main message I got from this is just to always show love. People need to be cared for and aggression doesn’t get us anywhere but further down.